Air conditioning units are typically employed to cool heated air and to supply cooled air to the computer systems in data centers. In some data centers, sensors are positioned at various locations and provide information to the air conditioning units, which the air conditioning units use in distributing cooling resources. In these types of data centers, the air conditioning units attempt to cool the areas around the sensors from which they receive the information, regardless of the airflow conditions around the respective sensors.
However, some of the sensors are oftentimes positioned in locations of the data center that are not particularly useful, such as, areas containing no computer systems or airflow. In addition, when computer systems in a particular area are deactivated, stagnation areas often form at the front of the computer systems, which often result in incorrect temperature measurements as airflow is not being drawn into the computer systems. Conventional air conditioning units waste cooling resources to cool these stagnation areas, even though cooling at those areas is unnecessary since the computer systems are inactive. As another example, computer equipment manufacturers occasionally design their equipment, such as network switches, to output hot air in directions that are counter to the direction of airflow outputted from the computer systems. In this example, the hot air may be detected by a sensor and may cause overcooling of the computer systems located near or in the airflow path of that sensor.
One approach to solving these problems has been to manually adjust the states of some of the sensors such that the air conditioning units do not rely on the information received from those sensors. This approach, however, is time consuming and prone to human error.